Providing your best time in the Amazon - ------www.gilserique.com---------

Saturday, 18 July 2009

While trotting happily through a remote region of the Brazilian Amazon, naturalists stumbled upon a new species of monkeys, with an abnormally large tail, and a peculiar gray and dark brown coloring. Aside from its anthropological value, the find demonstrates again that new discoveries in this field of research are always a possibility, and not only for worm or lizard species, but for large mammals too. According to the experts who found the new animal, it's somehow related to the saddleback tamarin, and features a distinctly mottled saddle itself, LiveSciencereports.

The small creature is very light, and weighs in at under one pound (213 grams). It's only nine inches (240 millimeters) tall, but its tail can reach a foot (320 millimeters) in length. Scientists first discovered Mura's saddleback tamarin (saguinus fuscicollis mura) in a 2007 expedition, as naturalists were investigating the rain forests in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. The name of the fuzzy creature comes from the Mura Indians, which inhabit the Purus and Madeira river basins, where the monkey was first identified. According to historians, this ethnicity was the most widespread in the Amazon at one point.

“This newly described monkey shows that even today there are still major wildlife discoveries to be made. This discovery should serve as a wake-up call that there is still so much to learn from the world's wild places, yet humans continue to threaten these areas with destruction,” Fabio Rohe, the lead author of a new study detailing the find, and a member of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), cautions. Other authors include Jose de Sousa e Silva Jr. (Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi), Ricardo Sampaio (the Instituto Nacional de Parquisas de Amaozonia), and Anthony B. Rylands (Conservation International).

However, the expert says that the success of finding the new species could soon be shadowed by losing it again, this time to extinction. A brand new highway is being constructed squarely through the Amazonian forest, and plans for building a gas pipeline and two new dams on rivers in the region are also in the early stages. The main concern is that these land-management schemes will draw in a lot of workers, with their families, and that people will begin to settle down and cut the forest, as they've done on so many occasions elsewhere in the country.

I AM SURPRISED!!!!!!!!!!!!

SMALL PRIMATES NEW LIST SP. WILL CERTAINLY INCREASE WHEN LARGE SP WILL BE GOING OUT OF THE FOREST AND THE MAP

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Gil Serique: Culture, Windsurf & Wildlife In the Amazon
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